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Introduction: Elderly Care Services in China: Exploring an Integrated Approach towards Active Ageing Zhang Yanxia (bio) and Zhao Litao (bio) Population ageing has emerged as a significant global challenge. The elderly care services in major developed countries are experiencing a shift from institutional care to home-based and community care again. Establishing a positive view of ageing and advancing integrated care services for the elderly to promote healthy ageing have become mainstream trends for countries in response to population ageing. All-inclusive or integrated care models have demonstrated remarkable potential on an international scale, including the integrated health and social care model in Sweden,1 the Vanguard "New Care Model" in England,2 the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly in the United States3 and the Community-based Integrated Care Model in Japan.4 In China, the ageing demographic is characterised by its vast scale and rapid pace, posing even greater economic and social challenges.5 Throughout the first half of the 21st century, China is poised to maintain its status as the country with the world's largest older population.6 It has entered a stage of moderate population ageing and is irreversibly advancing towards a deeply aged society. China's highly compressed End Page 3 ageing process has accelerated the dual challenges of "ageing before becoming wealthy" and "ageing before being prepared". In recent years, China has stepped up its active response to population ageing to a national strategic level. This involves the establishment of an elderly care service system that coordinates "home-based, community and institutional care" (jujia shequ jigou xiang xietiao). The system integrates medical care with health maintenance (yiyang kangyang xiang jiehe), placing community and home-based elderly services at its core. The goal is to provide holistic health and care services to address the multifaceted needs of the ageing population.7 Elderly care services in China have achieved some notable progress; nonetheless, providing the elderly with quality, comprehensive and systematic care services remains one of the key challenges facing the country. Despite a growing body of literature that examines China's various challenges in elderly care services, rigorous studies are still limited and urgently needed. Such studies would provide an updated perspective and in-depth analysis of recent developments, particularly in the pursuit of an integrated and coordinated approach that actively addresses population ageing with Chinese characteristics. Several important questions, however, remain insufficiently addressed: Has the development of the market economy dismantled China's filial piety culture and family-based elderly care? How do family and community factors influence the effective demands of older urban residents for community and home-based care services? What is the pathway for rural older adults to age in place within their villages? What are the major factors affecting the health-seeking behaviour among middle-aged and older people in China? What are the impacts of integrating community-based elderly care with medical care on illness-induced poverty among older people? What potential do intergenerational programmes hold in nurturing lifelong learning and strengthening intergenerational bonds in the Chinese context? In this special issue, the authors present a collection of high-quality empirical studies that rigorously evaluate recent changes in elderly care services in mainland China. Drawing upon some of the latest and most comprehensive data sources available, these studies provide up-to-date empirical evidence on China's exploration of an integrated approach towards active ageing in multiple dimensions. Collectively, they also provide insights into the development of these services in China, enrich the growing volume of international literature and offer cross-national comparative evidence, thereby informing policymaking and research on a broader scale. This introduction, in essence, highlights the unique contributions of each study/article and of this special issue as a whole. There are six articles, which the guest editors have classified under four section headings. The article in the first section delves into the intricate interplay between financial considerations and filial piety in Chinese family care, exploring how money and filial End Page 4 culture coexist and mutually influence each other.8 In the second section, two articles examine the amalgamation of family-based care and community care. They scrutinise how family embeddedness...
Zhang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.